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The questions executive mayors face regarding the fulfillment of their leadership role often reveal dilemmas and paradoxes. The subject of this article is how executive mayors cope with these dilemmas and paradoxes and whether or not the selection procedure matters. It presents results of a comparison of English elected mayors' interpretations of three dilemmas and Dutch appointed mayors' expectations of those same dilemmas. The first dilemma involves the creation of a sense of community versus multiplicity of inclusions and identities. The second dilemma concerns the need for strong leadership versus the networked character of society. The third dilemma involves that strong leadership is expected, potentially leading to leaders having a false image of strength. The results show that mayors must balance the dilemmas within the boundaries set by the leadership context. Second, the directly elected mayors in England differ little from centrally appointed mayors in The Netherlands regarding their handling of the dilemmas. INTRODUCTION: DIVERSE QUESTIONS FOR MAYORAL LEADERSHIPLike other public leaders, executive mayors face many diverse questions regarding the fulfilment of their leadership role. These questions often reveal dilemmas in fulfilling that role. The necessity of coping with these dilemmas poses serious challenges to executive mayors and other public leaders. By 'executive mayors' we mean mayors with executive responsibilities, either exclusive or shared ones, and not ceremonial mayors or mayors that merely preside over council or board meetings. Despite variation in procedures for selecting mayors across Europe (Schaap et al. 2009a), the dilemmas and challenges that confront mayors are arguably quite similar. This raises the central topic of this article: how do executive mayors cope with leadership dilemmas, and does the selection procedure affect their ability to cope with them? In other words, we first studied a diversity of demands that local society poses on the mayor; secondly, we questioned how mayors as local political leaders deal with those demands and dilemmas. We finally raise the question whether directly elected mayors in England behave differently in this matter to their Dutch appointed colleagues. Put more abstractly, the issue here is how specific institutional arrangements (that is, procedures for the selection of mayors) affect relationships of mayors with their local community.From the literature, in our search for dilemmas, we selected three major dilemmas and challenges concerning mayoral leadership. We decided to focus on external dilemmas, despite the undoubted relevance of internal dilemmas (for example, the choice between creating visions for the city and being an organizational leader, as addressed by Berg 2006, p. 328). The first dilemma, then, involves the necessity of creating a sense of community (a local identity) even though multiple inclusions and multiple identities characterize local communities. The second dilemma concerns the tension between the need for strong leade...

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